Rich snippets - People

New!schema.org lets you mark up a much wider range of item types on your pages, using a vocabulary that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! can all understand. Find out more. (Google still supports your existing rich snippets markup, though.)

About contact information

Marking up contact and social networking information in the body of a web page helps Google better recognize and display your information in search results.

Properties

Each contact (Person) can have a number of different properties, such as a name, a job title, and an address. You can use microdata, microformats, or RDFa markup to label these properties.

Google recognizes the following contact properties, derived from the hCard microformat. (Where the microdata/RDFa and microformats property names differ, the microformats property name appears in parentheses.)
Google also recognizes the XFNfriend, contact, and acquaintance properties, which are used to identify social relationships. Properties in bold are required. In addition, at least two of the following must be present:

title or role

affiliation (org)

address

Property

Description

name (fn)

Name

nickname

Nickname

photo

An image link

title

The person's title (for example, Financial Manager)

role

The person's role (for example, Accountant)

url

Link to a web page, such as the person's home page

affiliation (org)

The name of an organization with which the person is associated (for example, an employer). If fn and org have the exact same value, Google will interpret the information as referring to a business or organization, not a person.

friend

Identifies a social relationship between the person described and another person.

contact

Identifies a social relationship between the person described and another person.

acquaintance

Identifies a social relationship between the person described and another person.

address (adr)

The location of the person. Can have the subproperties street-address, locality, region, postal-code, and country-name.

Marking up content

The following HTML code describes Bob "Smithy" Smith.

<div>
My name is Bob Smith, but people call me Smithy. Here is my home page:
<a href="http://www.example.com">www.example.com</a>.
I live in Albuquerque, NM and work as an engineer at ACME Corp.
My friends:
<a href="http://darryl-blog.example.com">Darryl</a>,
<a href="http://edna-blog.example.com">Edna</a>
</div>

The following sections describe how to mark up this content using microdata, microformats, or RDFa.

On the first line, <itemscope itemtype="http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Person"> indicates that the HTML enclosed in the <div> represents a Person. itemscope indicates that the content of the <div> describes an item, and itemtype="http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Person" indicates that the item is a Person. person can be used to represent microformats vcard.

The sample describes properties of the person, such as his name, nickname, and job title. To label person properties, each element containing one of these properties (such as <div> or <span>) is assigned an itemprop attribute indicating a property. For example, <span itemprop="nickname">.

A property can consist of another item (in other words, an item can include other items). For example, the person information above includes an Address (itemtype="http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Address") with the properties locality and region.

In the first line, class="vcard" indicates that the HTML enclosed in the <div> describes contact information, in this case contact information for a Person.

(The microformat used to describe contact information is called hCard and is referred to in HTML as vcard. This isn't a typo.)

The sample describes properties of the Person item, such as a photo, name, title, organization, and address. To label properties about the person described by the vcard, each element containing one of these properties (such as <span> or <div>) is assigned a class attribute indicating a property. The vcard describes Bob's name (fn), his job title (title), and the organization he works for (org).

Properties can contain other properties. In the example above, the property adr describes the address of the person, and includes the subproperties locality, and region).

The example begins with a namespace declaration using xmlns. This indicates the namespace where the vocabulary (a list of entities and their components) is specified. You can use the xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" namespace declaration any time you are marking up pages for people, review, or place data. Be sure to use a trailing slash and # (xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#").

Also on the first line, typeof="v:Person" indicates that the marked-up content represents a Person.

Each property of the Person (such as their name or nickname) is labeled using property. The property name is prefixed with v: (<span property="v:nickname">).

We want to include Bob's address information (typeof="v:Address") in the typeof="v:Person" entity. Here, we use rel instead of property to indicate a relationship between Bob (the entity v:Person) and this address (the entity v:Address). Then, we include <span typeof="v:Address"> to include the actual address entity.